


Gods with Dirty Faces

by MrProphet



Series: Mythic Noir [2]
Category: Norse Religion & Lore
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-21
Updated: 2017-04-21
Packaged: 2018-10-22 04:17:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,211
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10689585
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MrProphet/pseuds/MrProphet





	Gods with Dirty Faces

In my line of work, there are two rules that’ll keep you alive most of the time: stay away from mob stuff and never listen to a pretty face. These two rules have two things in common: they’re both real simple in theory and real tough in practice. If I kept to them any worse I’d be long dead, and if I’d kept to them a whole lot better I’d not be working out of a one room office on the unfashionable East Side, delivering ten grand pay-offs for rent money and liking my licks when I took them.

I always knew when the rules were going to get broken, and it always started with a dame. This particular dame spelled trouble from the moment I saw her; trouble with a capital T, and the rest of its letters weren’t lower case either. No-one who looked that good walked into my office unless they were desperate – mob desperate – and no one who looks that good ever gets used to taking no for an answer.

She had a lot of height for a dame, but she carried it well. She had caramel skin, golden, honey hair and chocolate eyes. There was nothing about her that wasn’t sweet and she had ‘health hazard’ written through her like a stick of rock. Nature had endowed her with a figure and a face that no amount of art or money could have matched and it hadn’t charged her a cent; if she’d paid market price she’d never have afforded the falcon-feather coat, the crimson, satin gown or the black, silk stockings. 

If there was much left after the ensemble she wasn’t carrying it in cash. She had a tiny clutch purse which can’t have had room for anything next to the dainty pistol it so obviously contained.

“You’re Loki?” she asked.

“Sure,” I agreed. It happened to be true, but for her I would’ve admitted to any name. I’d claim to be her worst enemy just for the privilege of carrying some of her bullets for her.

“The private eye?”

“Says so on the door.”

“So it does. My father told me you were a man who could get things done,” she explained.

I sat up in my chair and invited her to take the other, better seat; the one I bought for clients for rather more money than the office sets me back each month. “I’m inclined to trust your father, since he apparently knows me and never introduced us.”

“He and my brother Frey are both very protective,” she admitted with a pretty blush. She sat and crossed what I suddenly knew to be the best legs in the known world, and probably the rest of it as well.

“You’re the Lady?” I asked, although just for something to say. It never occurred to me to doubt it.

“Please,” she demurred. “Offstage I’m just Freyja.”

That didn’t sound like a ‘just’ to me and I told her so, even though my brain was telling me to cool it on the flirting. This little girl’s daddy ran the Vanir gang. Far Njord – when you control enough guns and money, everyone calls you ‘Dad’ – owned the docks and just about everyone on them. He was worth a cool million, and that was just the money he could talk about in public. The papers sometimes said that the police should do something and some fools sent petitions and claims to the mayor’s Anti-Corruption Commission, of which Far Njord was the chair.

The Vanir grew up and out from the unions on the docks and now owned just about every nightspot, speakeasy, bawdy house and racket on the East Side. They had been fighting on two fronts for years now, and holding their own against the cops and the other mobs. Commissioner Odin shook hands with Far Njord at every fundraiser in the city, then sent his troops in the Anti-rackEteering Special Intelligence and Response team out to bring him down. Meantime, in the slums of Little Russia, the Jotnar sharpened their shashkas, ready to pounce on the slightest show of weakness. Utgarda and his boys owned every den of vice that Far Njord didn’t and both sides were keen to complete the set.

In the romantic popular myth, the Vanir were painted as Robin Hood figures, the Jotnar as brutal thugs. In reality there was much to choose from, although the Vanir liked to pretend to a certain class. After one of Njord’s boys drilled you through the heart, you could be sure they’d send a wreath to the funeral. Classy, you see.

Taking on a job from Njord’s little girl wasn’t high on my to-do list, then. I’d helped him out once before, acting as a courier to the Jotnar on a case of kidnapping, and come within a hair’s breadth of losing what was now my second favourite skin. Far Njord was a killer, his son Frey was a killer and his wife – second wife, that is – was a killer, and a Jotnar by birth. That Frey had also married a Jotnar girl hadn’t helped and the two gangs were at daggers drawn. If I stepped into the fray – as it were – at this point, there wouldn’t be enough left of me to fill a cup.

Then again, Freyja was a hard girl to say no to, and not just because hers was the skin that had just pipped mine for the top of my best ten list. Word was, just because she sang in daddy’s clubs and looked good in all that satin, didn’t mean she was any less dangerous than the rest of her family. There were, they said, half-a-dozen Jotnar who’d made that mistake and would never make another.

“It’s my husband,” she explained. “He’s disappeared.” She cast her face downwards and her eyes upwards. I felt my heart go out to her and various other bits respond with equal vigour. “I can hardly bear to go home at night; our bedroom is so empty without him.”

“And what is it you want from me?”

“I want you to find him.” 

I admit, it might be the answer I was expecting, but it wasn’t the one I’d been hoping for. Finding as missing husband sounded harmless enough, but nothing involving her family could ever be safe. I knew I had to say no, just as surely as I knew I was going to say: “Sure.”

So she told me her tale of woe and even showed me the necklace at the heart of all the trouble. She told me her husband was Od; to leave a dame like this over one dumb call and a string of sparklers made him nothing short of peculiar.

“You will find him, won’t you?”

“I’ll do my best,” I promised. If I’d known then that in the next twenty-four hours I’d be threatened and shot at, find two bodies, be picked up – literally – by Lieutenant Thor while standing over one of those bodies with a gun in my hand and have my head merrily knocked around by the Vanir, Jotnar and Odin’s Æsir…

Well, the way she looked at me, I still would have said yes, but I might have quoted her a little higher.


End file.
